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This Month In Books, October 2009: Lorrie Moore’s “Self-Help” (short story collection) + The Chairs’ “No Fingers”

The Chairs – No Fingers

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Exercise patience and wade past “No Fingers’” opening 10 seconds of fuzz. “It’s worth it” would be an understatement.

Next up on this month’s list of books is Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. In short, do not trust this collection of stories; it will kill you. So many of her tales deal with loss, senility, and decomposition, it’s no wonder Moore crafted what amounts to a cookbook’s antithesis, illustrating not how good lives are baked, but rather how some people go about stomaching the crumbling pastries muddying their lives. Especially family.

Two pieces in particular, “How to Be an Other Woman” and “Go Like This,” are outright works of brilliance, their incisive humor supplemented by the rigidness of Self-Help’s instruction-manual storytelling format.

From “How to Be an Other Woman:”

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Moore’s starkness borders on heart-wrenching even when capped by wit.

I have lain. In bed. So many nights. Thinking of how it would be when I told him. And plotting, ruminating, remembering the ways our bodies used to love each other, touch, waltz. Now my body stands in the corner of the gym by the foul lines and extra crepe paper and doesn’t get asked to dance at all.
- Lorrie Moore, “Go Like This”

As for The Chairs, honestly, I debated not writing about the track at all (although it is my favorite of theirs), because its softest word — the last one! — is omitted. “Go.” They tacked it onto the beginning of the next track as a type of sound bridge between the two.

“No Fingers” simply fits Moore’s collection all too well.

Once you’ve braved the song’s remorse-laden waters, walked until you’re chin-deep, gingerly testing the seabed one tiptoe at a time, becoming Bobbing Nose And Eyes, and wondering whether the next step will be the one that finds your hair lapping at the ocean’s surface, you learn to trust it. You rub the salty sting of minor-chord-piano from your eyes and stand.

There lies a sandbar ahead where waves lick gently at your ankles, where the words “I want my time back” have no place, where your children understand if you have to, and where you understand if he has to, and your mother dies peacefully before asking who you are and what you’re doing at her bedside wiping the spittle from her nightgown.

There lies a shoal ahead. There has to.

[Buy Lorrie Moore's Self-Help, The Chairs' Website]

This Month In Books, October 2009: When Amy Hempel’s “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel” Met Michael Hurley’s “Parsnip Snips” LP

Michael Hurley – Light Green Fellow

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I’m beginning to wonder whether the artistic media my escapism hopscotches upon from one month to the next mimics the seasons. The nature of the content I engage per medium certainly adheres to this trajectory, so it would stand to reason the part of me that chooses literature over film in fall, or music over art in spring, too, would assent to these quarterly inclinations.

I spent the better part of October with my nose dripping into book after book. (Perhaps October is the time when one craves endless streams of letter-sized visual stimuli?) Above is a picture of this month’s lot; you can find the more compelling pieces at the top of the pile and the most odious at the very bottom. Please note, I have chosen not to include comics and graphic novels as part of this series; a separate column shall be dedicated exclusively to this end.

And now, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel and Michael Hurley’s haunting Parsnip Snips LP.

Michael Hurley – New Tea

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Years ago, during an interview where The Atlantic Monthly inquired about her writing process, Amy Hempel responded with the following statement:

“It [represents] the way I read. I’m not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I’m interested in who’s telling it and how they’re telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.

While, generally speaking, it’s rare for me to agree with those who subscribe to the philosophy that a work’s greatness often relies more heavily on the medium its inscribed than the content itself, I cannot help but make exception when it comes to this particular collection of short stories. (And, believe me, the content is nothing short of stunning.) Hempel’s insistence on emphasizing delivery above carefully structured plot development is one of the primary reasons her works are regarded as such jarring, heartbreaking masterpieces.

The last page of Hempel’s famed “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Burried” remorsefully reads:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.

Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

The best way for a writer to become more than a writer, to yield words that are more than words, is to embrace storytelling, to utilize the act of writing in an increasingly creative fashion — never as obligatory tool of the trade, but rather as an omnipresent, gainfully employed silent character.

And no short story author, really, no one accomplishes this feat with as much precision as Amy Hempel.

Which leads me, now, to Michael Hurley, the man whose recently reissued Parsnip Snips LP provided the aural backdrop during my time spent gulping down Hempel’s works.

So, how shall I put this?

I walk the track, the stars refuse to shine,
And it seemed like every minute, I was gonna lose my mind.
-Michael Hurley, “New Tea”

I like to think no state of peace, or war, or lending, no cavalry decree could gloom a man so as to produce a solemner gesture than Michael Hurley’s “New Tea.”

Hurley’s Parsnip Snips found me upon streets lined auburn, sidewalks spiced with unswept death and the sad sigh of fallen things, though I imagine the wispy draft of Hurley’s melancholic timbre enough to spirit any living person away.

The first page of Hempel’s “Tumble Home” closes with the devastating line, “How can I possibly put an end to this when it feels so good to pull sounds out of my body and show them to you?”

Which seems as concise a way as any for me to say that I desperately hope you get your hands on a copy of either Hempel’s or Hurley’s brilliant creations. Please.

[Buy "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel", Michael Hurley's Parsnip Snips LP]

New York, I Love You, But “New York, I Love You” Is Bringing Me Down

Sore Eros – Smile On Your Face

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To be fair, there were two commendable shorts, a few fallen eyelashes of well-crafted composition effectively conveying love (and cinematic reverence) for New York.

Regardless of these triumphs, New York, I Love You largely reads like a poorly-shot documentary interspersed with bland fictional scenarios driven aimlessly by even blander fictional characters.

And for a film to portray New York as an amalgam of sad, socially-stunted beasts, to make it devoid of any vivacity, to display, with confounding nonchalance, the passion, anguish, and ambition churning in the stomachs of so many residents and commuters alike — to essentially rob this city of its bellow — appears such an egregious oversight, one has to wonder from what devastatingly uninspiring New York these directors hail.

What lackluster imagination could have yielded such apathetic results?

Why bother creating a film that centers not around plot, nor image, nor sound, but instead lies entrenched in sentimental tripe, ploys intended to tug on store-bought heartstrings, lethargic twists, and the occasional ratty punchline? Even the cliche depictions of the city’s monuments would have been less offensive had they not managed to somehow completely avoid capturing any of what makes the natural and architectural marvels of New York so unequivocally inspirational.

I’ll overlook the fact that, as far as these filmmakers are concerned, New York consists almost exclusively of two boroughs, but to narrow their scope so sharply and still fail to establish any cohesion constitutes an embarrassing shortcoming on their part.

The biggest tragedy is that this film could easily have been titled “Anywhere, I Visited You Once,” and that a similar “New York, I Love You” could have been produced by anyone with a smattering of stock footage and a map of lower Manhattan.

Hey, at least we learned Shia LaBeouf knows how to limp.

Noteworthy Scores And Soundtracks: Hans Zimmer’s Frost/Nixon

Hans Zimmer – Insanely Risky

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After nearly a decade of studying film scores, this much I can say — Hans Zimmer doesn’t do boring.

Until now.

For all his faults, Zimmer never fails to display an overwhelming command of sound, one endlessly engaging viewers aurally, for better or worse. The most frequently voiced qualms deal with Zimmer’s execution more so than the content produced, a dependence on bombast when subtlety would better complement the images at hand.

Which is why, after finally having viewed Frost/Nixon, I cannot fathom how Zimmer managed to infuse so much noise into such little sound.

Plucky, sleuth-like aural investigations are fitting for a Thomas Newman score — they’re even a trademark characteristic — but Zimmer? No. This was a film whose chief actor, Frank Langella, was lauded (rightly so) particularly for his incredible feats of voice acting. As such, this was also a film that rapidly established the superfluousness an involved film score would present.

Nondiagetic music barely utters a peep throughout Frost/Nixon, displaying its most overt gestures during the ending’s credit sequence. And while I’m tempted to compare Zimmer’s Frost/Nixon score to that of John Williams’s for Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), it would be unfair, if for no other reason than the difference in scope between the two films (i.e. the expansive nature of the latter, and the focused undertaking of the former).

That said, while Frost/Nixon’s modest employment of Zimmer’s minimalist score was in all likelihood for the best, they would have done better to altogether avoid contracting the most indulgent of film composers. What Frost/Nixon needed was someone who could shape one note into a blanket capable of engulfing the viewer in harrowed desolation. Instead, Zimmer hems 10 notes into a solitary, flat thud, both noncommittal and directionless.

A first for Zimmer, preferably a last.